Movie review: ‘A Simple Favor’ is a complicated comedy-mystery

Ed Symkus More Content Now

Wednesday

Sep 12, 2018 at 12:37 PMSep 12, 2018 at 12:37 PM

Paul Feig got his career cooking in TV, directing multiple episodes of “Arrested Development,” “Nurse Jackie,” and “The Office.” When he jumped to feature films, he zeroed in on comedies with female leads, seeming to be most comfortable when Melissa McCarthy was starring. Feig directed the McCarthy vehicles “Bridesmaids,” “The Heat,” “Spy,” and the “Ghostbusters” reboot. But since she’s gone off to try some more serious stuff (“Can You Ever Forgive Me?” opens in mid-October), Feig, with “A Simple Favor,” has moved over to a couple of very different actors — Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively — and made a film that’s a comedy as well as a mystery and a thriller, with hints that it might turn into a ghost story with an edge of psychological horror.

Yet it at first just appears to be about a couple of women who recently became pals, even though they’re extreme opposites. Single mom Stephanie (Kendrick), widowed when her husband was in the wrong car at the wrong time, is prim, proper, chatty, nerdy, always smiling, and always keeping herself busy with her “Hi, Moms!” advice video blog. Happily married Emily (Lively) is confident, forward, always cursing, and an expert on the proper way to make afternoon martinis.

But, hold on ... is Emily’s marriage to failed author Sean (Henry Golding) really all that happy? And why is it that when Stephanie innocently snaps a photo of her, she not only tells her firmly to delete it, she also threatens her with violence if it isn’t done immediately? More important, maybe Stephanie should listen when Emily looks her right in the eye and says, “You do not want to be friends with me.”

All of this comes a short while after the film’s opening moments, when Stephanie, vlogging about some innocuous cooking idea, says to whoever’s watching that her “best friend” Emily has gone missing. What she doesn’t say is that she disappeared shortly after asking Stephanie for a simple favor: “Please watch my son; I’ll be back in a little while.”

Yes, the word “comedy” was mentioned a couple of paragraphs ago, and this film is quite funny, thanks to the casual and breezy delivery of the dialogue that was adapted from the Darcey Bell novel. There’s also the bright humor that emerges from the blatant opposites-attract differences between the two women.

But when Emily vanishes, and her husband and Stephanie get together to talk about what might have happened, and the cops arrive — look for a great character performance from Bashir Salahuddin (Keith Bang on “GLOW”) as Detective Summerville — the film’s moods and textures start changing.

Salahuddin isn’t alone in the strong acting department. Lively plays it glamorous and enigmatic. Kendrick shows remarkable versatility, handily stretching from being bland to firmly taking charge of her situation. Golding, who recently managed to be the cement that held together “Crazy Rich Asians” in the male lead role, has a character here whose motivations are hard to pinpoint, which is what makes the part work.

Questions keep rising: Does Sean have secrets? Is Stephanie not quite as pure as she’s initially made out to be? Do new layers of mystery around Emily keep growing even as older ones are peeled back?

The funny parts coming, but just before the halfway point, the script makes the first of many daring shifts, triggering the film to shoot into all sorts of directions, in the best of ways. It has the audience in its hands and it does whatever it wants with them. It’s very difficult to be sure about anything, but in the end, the audience will know that they’ve had a ripping good time.

— Ed Symkus writes about movies for More Content Now. He can be reached at esymkus@rcn.com.

“A Simple Favor”

Written by Jessica Sharzer; directed by Paul Feig

With Anna Kendrick, Blake Lively, Henry Golding

Rated R

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